


God's Voiceless (Ave Maria)

by Go0se



Category: D.Gray-man
Genre: Backstory, Body Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, Cross Marian Is A Bad Person, DGM canon-typical mistreament of Exorcists by the Black Order, Gen, Hello it's Goose at 10:24 on the 9th of November; and this is a horror story, Missing Backstory, POV Female Character, You ever think about how Cross just carries around a woman's corpse to throw into battle sometimes, and somehow everybody's just okay with that? Because I do
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-09
Updated: 2019-11-09
Packaged: 2021-01-26 11:03:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21373096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Go0se/pseuds/Go0se
Summary: How Exorcist Maria came to the Order, and how she left it.
Relationships: Maria (D. Gray-Man) & General Kevin Yeegar
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	God's Voiceless (Ave Maria)

Her name is Marja. She lives in Finland, with her mother and her father and her three brothers and one sister, and the ghost of a second sister who died before Marja was born.

Times are hard. The adults always say this, although Marja doesn’t understand. She’s never known anything else. But she believes them that the skies weren’t always this dark, the policeman not always this violent, the bread not always this full of rot that her mother picks out with quick, clever fingers before she passes it over to the children.  
Sometimes Marja watches her mother and father not eat at all, just sliding the bowl full of thin stew closer towards them. Her second brother whispers to wonder if mamma had missed some decaying pieces of the vegetables, only for their first brother to slap him upside the head. Marja doesn’t understand this, either.

Marja thinks that when she’s grown up and a woman, if times have changed by then, she wants to be a teacher. Their family doesn’t have enough money to send all of them to school but her older brothers come home with slates full of notes, and her mother uses that to teach Marja, her sister, and her younger brother. She likes the smooth lines of letters, and the way things settle in her mind like a well-whittled stick settles into your hand. Until she can be a teacher she’ll just grow up here, on the farm, help her brothers tend the chickens and teach her little sister to walk without holding onto things. She sings for her mother and father when they're done work for the day and have a rare moment to rest. Marja always loves to sing.

They don’t have any cattle or goats to milk, so they mainly drink water from a chilly spring that burbles up from the ground. On the rare day that their chores end before dark, all of the children play outside until they’re exhausted, relishing the sun. When they get thirsty they tromp up the steep hill to the spring.

Once, Maria thinks she sees something shining in it. She blinks and tries to reach for it, and keeps trying, even though her siblings tease her and say it’s just the light on the water or her going all funny-headed. There’s something there: she can _feel_ it, even if her small fingers can't fit around it. It feels like something's calling to her.  
Eventually she gets tired of the game, and like all of them, she dips her hands to drink.

That’s the beginning of everything.

The year Marja is twelve brings too much rain in the winter, and a sickness in the town that gets worse as the days get longer. By the stinking heat of high summer, the streets are nearly empty and tears are permanent on everyone’s faces.

On a thick, heavy evening, that summer, floating demons with horrible gray skin descend on the village like fire and thunder. There are only two of them, but they break walls into pieces and kill without touching. Buildings and fields go up in flames. Many people try to run.  
Three in Marja’s family are murdered in the assault. She’s kneeling in the middle of ashes, clutching her younger brother’s body in her arms, wild-eyed with shock and grief, when something pulses in her throat. Not her own heart or breath, but some other, living thing.  
Marja screams and screams and _screams_ and then--  
the monsters explode above her, tearing the air apart.  
As suddenly as they attacked, they are gone. Her village is left with cinders and the remains of the dead.

When she’s thirteen, the strange priests come to take her away.

*

In France, in the echoing halls of the Black Order, she becomes ‘Maria’ because the branch chief looks down his nose at her accented English and pronounces that it will be easier for her tutors.

It is not her name. But she’s always been a good performer. She grows used to the wrong syllables, the sharp _eee_ sound in the middle like squealing hinges. She learns to answer to it. She shapes the unfamiliar consonants in a mirror during the little time she has alone in bathing rooms before it’s considered suspicious, until they seem almost natural coming from her own lips.

In the same way she learns to bite back the instinct to bare her teeth at the robed, faceless people waiting in the training rooms, in the dorms, always standing at corners, anywhere Exorcists could potentially be alone. They are all watched, chronicled, at nearly all times.

_They. _The Exorcists. That's what else she's being called, now, along with 'Maria'.  
She hates the man they apprentice her to at first, just on principle; seeing in him all the evil that had brought her here. But over time her heart softens to General Yeegar. He is strict in his regimens, but he is kind. He's as much a teacher as a soldier, and she learns to breathe easier around him.

The Exorcists, her comrades, are a complicated bunch. Some are just as new and lost as her, some battle-hardened already, some who scream at night. From all over the world, seemingly.  
A curse and a mercy is that other women are here; other girls too, children even. She feels safer with them than anywhere else. She tries to use what Yeegar teaches her to protect the younger girls, in what little ways she can, from the faceless guards and from seeing the things she’s seen. Picking rot from the bread.

The actual bread she eats has no rot in it. The food here is good; plentiful and filling. As Exorcists their food intake is monitored closely to make sure they do not starve themselves.

Her first year at the Black Order, that by itself makes her sick.

*

They tell her that her Innocence lives in her voice, and she tries not to imagine it as a growth strangling her from the inside. Not because it isn’t suffocating; but because there is no choice in rejecting it, now.

And she doesn’t even want to. Despite the skin-crawling claustrophobia of captivity, despite the outright cruelty of the people who tore her from her family, she finds that there’s some worth in this. In being an Exorcist. Marja had never even dreamed of being a soldier, but she remembers holding her brother in her arms. No one should have to live through that. They tell her, and she believes, the Innocence can help her prevent it.

When she thinks this way she can feel it warming her throat like an ember under a blanket. It’s impossible to imagine it as anything other than a living thing, entirely separate from her.

She doesn’t know whether to fear it or not. As she learns from Yeegar, and her comrades who she sees die in more ways than she cares to count over many years that follow, fear is not really the question. Being fearful of God makes you a good tool for the Order to use. The question is if she can use her Innocence _well_. Well enough to fight, to kill, to survive.

They tell her they’ve named it ‘Aria Of Grace’.  
  
  
*

Cross Marian is not a friend. He’s not a companion or a lover-- no matter what other snide scientists say with their badly-hushed whispers and sidelong looks at her, where she stands next to him at the table in the Headquarters’ damp basement. He is a scientist. He is a lecher who smokes too much, and the smell would make her choke except for the words which float with it, as he shares his research with her.

Because she was curious, and had asked. Marja had wanted to teach but that’s not possible here, so she will do her best to learn.

Cross is one of the only scientists who will speak to her, or any of the other Exorcists. It’s not fear that separates her comrades from the other divisions of the Order, exactly, but it’s not reverence either. Sometimes she feels it’s a strange sort of expectation that they look at her and the others with. A kind of impatience. She is a pariah now, despite being a saviour. Or a murderer, depending on which way you cared to look.

It’s a relief to talk with someone who doesn’t stare at her coat or neck the way that so many in the Order do. Even if that person is rude and far too forward.

They discuss science-- and later, politics, music, traveling, and views on the world. They skirt around what could fragiley be called ‘hope’, and avoid discussing religion or God entirely. He asks about her Innocence, its uses and powers, but that’s not the same. Cross seems to enjoy her questions, and as long as they are discussing things outside the Order's hierarchy he is interesting to be around.

Time passes, during which Marja gets to know him. She still wouldn’t call him a friend, but he proves himself an ally.

As well as a liar.  
Some of the thoughts he has are far too pointed to be idly rallied in a conversation. The topics they avoid are too specific. Cross is hiding something; and not some trifle either. She doesn’t know what it could be, what he’d risk his very life for-- as she’d learned, Cross valued himself above all other things. Save, apparently, one.

Marja knows asking would be fruitless. He’d never tell, certainly not her. And she thinks, though she laughs at herself for the paranoia, that he might kill a person if they found out. It might not even cause him much pain. That could be why he’d taken such a thing on his soul. There’s an old joke she learned at the Order, that three men could keep a secret if two of them were dead.

Whatever it is he's hiding, it needs ruthlessness. Cross has ruthlessness in spades. She's certain of that right up until the end, and she is right.  
  
  
*  
  
  
Maria dies somewhere outside of Moskow, in the ruins of a small township that had ending up cornering her and her comrades during an attempted retreat.  
They're investigating a masquerade when two of the guests morph into horrible, mechanized insects, murdering half the ballroom in seconds. They run, but not nearly far enough. Trapped by rotting buildings on all sides, exhausted and surrounded, the Exorcists fight. They perish almost as quickly as the dancers.

Maria is dead. Marja is dead. Aria Of Grace is dead.

  
*

  
Something goes wrong.

  
*

So much is left unknown when you're dead, which surprises her. Her moment of dying had been… she wants to think there'd been quiet. Complete darkness. A sense of anticipation, of readying. Like movement in a chrysalis.  
How long had the quiet lasted? It's so hard to remember time. No sense of scale. Only a before, and an after.

She can sense something coming to her, when she dies. But before it does, it is. Interrupted.

And after...  
There shouldn’t be an ‘and’, shouldn’t be a continuation. Marja can't say why, because bridges from thoughts to memories are gone, so it is difficult to think. She doesn't know what has happened. But it feels _wrong_. It doesn’t feel like being dead should.

This _is_ death; she's sure of it, more than she's ever been sure of anything. She can't hear, can't see, can't speak, can't move of her own will. But whatever has happened has broken death, proper. She still has a will. And she should not. So does the Innocence, the familiar alien thing burning up her neck. And it should not.

She cannot rest.

She cannot rest.

She is deaf, blind, mute, and paralyzed, and awake as she floats in the dark. Time seems to have passed her by, but despite this she can feel the long moments of nothing. And the vague impacts and motions and pulls of her limbs when the nothing ends. Like her thoughts, the connective tissue of sensation to pain has diffused in her death, so it doesn't hurt, which only makes the movements stranger. Her body is a marionette dangling, strings jumping as she is pulled by unseen hands.

When changes come, she senses more than hears someone calling to her, a fish hook tugging behind her collarbone to jar her out of some strange dream. They use a name that isn't hers. Something that isn’t her breath moves in her throat.

She sings.

  
It is strange, to have it feel so deeply unnatural. Marja had always loved to sing.

**Author's Note:**

> This is what I spent some time doing instead of working on my NaNoWriMo novel! The second part of the title is Latin for 'Hail Mary'. The first was inspired / taken from this, which is a beautiful poem about turkey vultures, and which I related to Maria, especially the last lines:
> 
> _'In The Garden Of Eden', by Sheryl St. Germain_
> 
> _No one tells much about it,  
but there were vultures in the Garden of Eden,  
Turkey vultures, to be exact.  
Dark eagles, they would soar like gods  
voiceless, their wings held out in blessing,  
their unfeathered heads the red jewels  
of the sky of the garden._
> 
> _They were vegetarian then.  
There were no roadside kills,  
no bones to pick, no dead flesh to bloom, ripen._
> 
> _And they were happy.  
They could not imagine  
what they would become._
> 
> \- 
> 
> Thank you for reading.


End file.
